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The new "Shark" model of our robot

Last year we spend considerable amount of time building the new version of our robotics vehicle. Here is the result - the small tracked vehicle which might be interesting for researchers in robotics, AI, computer vision as well as for DIY enthusiasts. All the CAD models, assembling instructions and software are open source.

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For the last couple of days, I wanted to concentrate on reducing time required to boot our robot. The first action I did was to find out minimum configuration for kernel. After couple of rounds of getting SD card between computer and Beagleboard XM, which is the base for our robot, I decided to check how other people are developing kernel on embedded systems. The standard approach is to boot kernel from network.

Fortunately, the hard part was already done: u-boot support for network chip is already implemented. Here I wanted to document steps, required to get it working. Most of the information is available somewhere on the Internet, here is just place to get it all together.

Unfortunately, I could not configure DHCP server to get required parameters for TFTP boot, so...

The mission: u-boot loads kernel from nfs and kernel mounts nfs root.

Assumptions

Network configuration: I will be using static IP addresses to minimize influence of "bad" DHPC server. It will be go…

Here is my first example for the Unit 1 of the CS373 free online class. Please see this post for the introduction of this example series. This example illustrates how to perform one-dimensional localization using histogram filter we have learned in Unit 1 of the class. I will be using our Veter vehicle to illustrate how to control real robotics vehicle. To illustrate the one-dimensional localization algorithm, I have made the following test environment:

The Figure 1 illustrates our vehicle and the line of A4 paper sheets which represents the "wall". Each sheet is labeled with the number (0, 2, 3, etc., from right to left) which is the position within the line. Sheets with numbers 1 and 4 are removed to simulate the "door". We assume here, that robot can make discrete movement one position left or right. So the localization problem is to determine current position of the robot, i.e. in front of which sheet the robot currently is. So it roughly corresponds to the fo…

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